PECO and North American trackage.

Hi Paul,

It's been in Templot right from the beginning in 1980.

In the 70s and early 80s I was manufacturing pointwork to order and always offered "EM minus 2" as the preferred standard for finescale 00. Customers were sometimes wary at first, but always came back for more. The fact is that it works very well, and the narrower 1mm flangeway gives improved running with continuous support through V-crossings for wheels down to 2.3mm width (same as EM)(or even narrower if you use sharp-nose vees). I manufactured hundreds of turnouts to this standard and no doubt many are still in use.

Obviously you are restricted to sensible radii co-mensurate with those for EM, say 30" minimum. No-one is going to be daft enough to copy a Peco small radius turnout in 16.2mm gauge.

Although "EM minus 2" had been known about as an option for finescale 00 since the inception of the present EM standards, as with many gauges there didn't appear to be an accepted designation for it. So in Templot I called it 00-SF (special fine).

I removed all the narrow gauges from the Templot list of pre-set gauges several versions ago. It was impossible to cater for all the possible n.g. variations without the list becoming absurdly long. But it is very easy to create a custom setting for any gauge or scale, as you know.

I'm happy to talk Templot anywhere!

Martin.

---------- email: snipped-for-privacy@templot.com web:

Which reminds me, much of the Exactoscale web site is as much use as a chocolate teapot. Go to the products page and none of the links on the left actually work for me. The "some of these pages may not yet be complete" note has been there for the best part of a year. Anyone see any different?

MBQ

Martin,

That doesn't necessarily make it a standard :-)

I still can't remember any discussions about this 'new' 00 gauge when the gauge of EM was adjusted to 18.2mm, and I'm sure there would have been considering the amount of 'discussion' there has been over

Sounds a bit like the 7mm scale Fine standards situation where there now seems to be about four gauges at the last count - I think I've heard of 31mm, 31.2mm, 31.5mm and the original 32mm.

Taking up slop in a set of standards might be OK under controlled circumstances but is surely going to start causing problems when locos and stock, which depend on the slop to perform satisfactorily, come up against the tighter gauges.

Jim.

Hi guys

I wasn't going to bother with this thread but I've noticed that no one has changed the subject even though it has changed completely. Gripe over.

Anyway, here we go again with the old 16.2 business.

If for some reason your stuck modelling in '00', maybe because you have a lot of stock or a club layout or members with stock they are not willing or can't afford to re-wheel, then 16.2 is a great answer for new track.

It works just fine and gets you over the terrible Bachmann b-to-b varying measurements. How can you hope to improve on '00' track when Bachmann give you b-to-b measurements from 14.2 upwards.

I can confirm 16.2 gauge with 1mm flangeways works with all the '00' wheels I have so far come across. They also ride smooth over the frogs with no drop into the gap.

I defy you to tell the .3mm difference when you see a layout so equipped.

Cheers

Might be old to you but some of us have never even heard of it. Sorry.

db.

It's been on here before

I am only arguing 0.05mm in the track gauge or if you like the same difference in the check gauge the way it seem you have interpreted the 00-SF standard. This is the average difference between the track you use and the track I use. In practice 99.9% of the time, the difference is not noticeable if ever. The difference will however change slightly which wheels will need adjustment of their back to back. In practice the minimum check gauge you are building to is less than the 00-SF 15.2mm if you are using the 16.2 mm track gauge and the 1mm flangeway. That's a error of the standard which is compensated for by the standard insisting on using wheels with a check gauge of 15.1mm. This is OK for some UK manufactured wheels which use this check gauge, but it's not ideal for European or US influenced wheels. Today most popular RTR track uses the 15.2mm check gauge, and wheels on RTR equipment are set to work on RTR track. Some RTR track requires the NMRA back to back. The aim of 00 is to be able to use RTR without modification.

The practical differences between my HO finescale standard and your probable way of building 00-SF is (assuming a tolerance of 0.05mm)

If you interpret the 00-SF standard correctly and want to use 1mm minimum flangeways, then you need to increase the minimum track gauge to 16.25mm of you use a working tolerance of 0.05mm. However the 14.3mm back to back dimension of the 00-SF becomes to small for complex trackwork, that's a problem with this standard. A standard needs to be correct for all situations. As described the 00-SF standard fails. It's in the right ball park, and it appears 1mm flangeway finescale has been used since 1936. The mathematics demonstrate the standard needs correcting.

I to have the same claim to make about correctly defined HO Finescale. The difference is you cannot fully comply with the 00-SF standard. The standard is not practical because of its errors.. Building trackwork that uses 1mm flangeways for RTR HO/OO models is practical, as demonstrated by you, me and many around the world. I have a solution for a practical standard, my standard adds up..

The EM standard has or had the same problem.

According to the 00 gage history on the web HO probably preceded 00 and EM. My guess is back in 1936 H0 could still have been a gauge, Half 0 gauge, even though in the UK the mm/ft scale system was in use. 0 gauge was 1 1/4". That would make H0 gauge originally at 5/8", that's only 15.87mm. If we use the later metric rounded up definition of 0 gauge, 32mm, H0 becomes 16mm. H0 became a standard scale of 3.5mm/ft, and the gauge became a nominal 16.5mm, which became a minimum dimension in the coarse scale standards. If the UK modeller want's maximum compatibility and reliability, then they should adopt the same track standards as HO modellers use. A more universal name might be H0/00 finescale. There is no need for any difference, and no advantage sticking to out of date poorly defined BRMSB, NEM or NMRA standards. It just leads to confusion and continued incompatibility of RTR. In the end Peco are going to make track which suits the largest market, and that is H0, and the RTR wheels will be made compatible with Peco track.

It is possible to build track that is compatible with RTR with slightly narrower flangeways as you indicated in an earlier thread. Here are the sizes required. I have used a tolerance of 0.03mm, which is the same as working with S4 and Proto87. These dimensions are only required for the crossing V area.

Wheel maximum check gauge NEM 15.2mm Wheel back to back minimum 14.38mm Maximum flangeway 0.99mm Minimum flangeway 0.96mm Maximum track gauge 16.22mm Minimum track gauge 16.19mm

Again it is close to 00-SF. As you can see there is minimal advantage going to such tight tolerances. If we go to a smaller check gauge or larger wheel minimum back to back the track flangeways can be made finer again, but both options result in severely limiting the RTR wheels that can be used, and the whole point of the excerise is to build track suitable for RTR.

I use similar jigs to the ones used to build P4 track. Thus it is easier for me to get it right because of the larger tolerance I work to. It is also easier to make HO/OO gauges within tolerance. You are right about RTR back to backs, especially for UK models. At the moment manufacturers are in a transition stage, moving from coarse scale to wheels suitable for Peco so called 'finescale' 75. However it is easier to correct and maintain HO/OO back to back compared to P4 because the tolerance again is larger. I can have a large range of wheels which will work perfectly on my finescale track, with minimal or no adjustment to most RTR finescale products I use.

These layouts you are using as examples must have trackwork much flatter then the average HO/00/EM layout. Its purely a function of flange depth. The deeper the flange, the rougher the track work can be. Easy to prove.

The difference in the gauge of 0.3mm is not noticeable. The narrower gauge allows closer to scale flangeways, which results in superior running compared to current RTR track. It also allows closer to scale wheels to be used.

The slop is so excessive in the old coarse scale standards RTR track uses that it needs reducing in order to make the models perform satisfactorily, especially over complex track such as slips. The values on my HO finescale shows it 1mm flangeways work.

"Terry Flynn" wrote

I'm sorry Terry, but to claim that any dimension is not noticeable is a pretty poor basis for an argument.

It's been proven with fine scale OO that narrower flangeways and finer scale wheels are perfectly feasible without narrowing the already underscale gauge further.

John.

Of course it is true, but making narrower flangeways to the correct track gauge leads to EM and P4. If you want to use RTR 00 and build track with narrower flangeways, the only option is to use a narrower track gauge, this to is proven.

If you use the dimensions on my HO finescale page you can build any form of complex trackwork because my standard was designed to work with practical tolerances. There might be a dual gauge prototype which might prove impossible, the only one I know of is a dual gauge turntable, combining 4'8

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Graham Plowman